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By Whatever Means It Is Accomplished, The Prime Business Of A Play Is To Arouse The Passions Of Its Audience So That By The Route Of Passion May Be Opened Up New Relationships Between A Man And Men, And Between Men And Man. Drama Is Akin To The Other Inventions Of Man In That It Ought To Help Us To Know More, And Not Merely To Spend Our Feelings.

-Arthur Miller

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By Whatever Means It

Arthur Miller

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By Whatever Means It Is Accomplished, The Prime Business Of A Play Is To Arouse The Passions Of Its Audience So That By The Route Of Passion May Be Opened Up New Relationships Between A Man And Men, And Between Men And Man. Drama Is Akin To The Other Inventions Of Man In That It Ought To Help Us To Know More, And Not Merely To Spend Our Feelings.

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Proctor--he Knows It Is Insane: No, It Is Not The Same! What Others Say And What I Sign To Is Not The Same!

Whoever Is Writing In The United States Is Using The American Dream As An Ironical Pole Of His Story. People Elsewhere Tend To Accept, To A Far Greater Degree Anyway, That The Conditions Of Life Are Hostile To Mans Pretensions.

He's Liked, But He's Not Well Liked.

Can Anyone Remember Love? It's Like Trying To Summon Up The Smell Of Roses In A Cellar. You Might See A Rose, But Never The Perfume.

The Enemy Is Within, And Within Stays Within, And We Can't Get Out Of Within.

The Task Of The Real Intellectual Consists Of Analyzing Illusions In Order To Discover Their Causes.

Why Am I Trying To Become What I Don’t Want To Be … When All I Want Is Out There, Waiting For Me The Minute I Say I Know Who I Am.

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Memory Inevitably Romanticizes, Pressing Reality To Recede Like Pain.

When Any Creativity Becomes Useful, It Is Sucked Into The Vortex Of Commercialism, And When A Thing Becomes Commercial, It Becomes The Enemy Of Man.

A Political Policy Is Equated With Moral Right, And Opposition To It With Diabolical Malevolence.

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The Problem Was To Sustain At Any Cost The Feeling You Had In The Theater That You Were Watching A Real Person, Yes, But An Intense Condensation Of His Experience, Not Simply A Realistic Series Of Episodes.

Without Alienation, There Can Be No Politics.

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I Realized What A Ridiculous Lie My Whole Life Has Been.

In His Play Depicting The Salem Witch Trials, The Author Illustrates Profound Psychological Bullying. The Ringleader Of Young Girls Suspected Of Unsavory Conduct, Frightens Her Friends Into Silence By Warning: Now, Look You; All Of You. We Danced. And Tituba Conjured Ruth Putnam's Dead Sisters, And That Was All. ... Let Either Of You Breathe A Word, Or The Edge Of A Word, About The Other Things, And I Will Come To You In The Black Of Some Terrible Night, And I Will Bring A Pointy Reckoning That Will Shudder You.

I'm The End Of The Line; Absurd And Appalling As It May Seem, Serious New York Theater Has Died In My Lifetime.

God Really Does Take Our Work Seriously: It Is Wrong, It Is A Sin, To Accept Or Remain In A Position That You Know Is A Mismatch For You. Perhaps That's A Form Of Sin You've Never Considered - The Sin Of Staying In The Wrong Job. But God Did Not Place You On The Earth To Waste Away Your Years In Labor That Does Not Employ His Design Or Purpose For Your Life, No Matter How Much You May Be Getting Paid For It.

The Wedding Of Christianity Or Judaism With Nationalism Is Lethal.

Immortality Is Like Trying To Carve Your Initials In A Block Of Ice In The Middle Of July.

It Was Not Really Possible To Understand Oneself, Let Alone Another Human Being.

He's Not The Finest Character That Ever Lived. But He's A Human Being, And A Terrible Thing Is Happening To Him. So Attention Must Be Paid.

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Be Liked And You Will Never Want.

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Hale, With A Tasty Love Of Intellectual Pursuit

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I Love Her Too, But Our Neuroses Just Don't Match.

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Serious Business

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Oh,elizabeth, Your Justice Would Freeze Beer.

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No One Wants The Truth If It Is Inconvenient.

Don't Take It On Yourself. Forget Now. Live.

Never Fight Fair With A Stranger, Boy. You'll Never Get Out Of The Jungle That Way.

The Theater Is So Endlessly Fascinating Because It's So Accidental. It's So Much Like Life.

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The Word "now" Is Like A Bomb Through The Window, And It Ticks.

The Need Of Man To Wholly Realize Himself Is The Only Fixed Star.

Chris: I Don't Know Why It Is, But Every Time I Reach Out For Something I Want, I Have To Pull Back Because Other People Will Suffer.

Sometimes...it's Better For A Man Just To Walk Away. But If You Can't Walk Away? I Guess That's When It's Tough.

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Part Of Knowing Who We Are Is Knowing We Are Not Someone Else. And Jew Is Only The Name We Give To That Stranger, The Agony We Cannot Feel, The Death We Look At Like A Cold Abstraction. Each Man Has His Jew; It Is The Other.

If I Have To Be Alone I Want To Be By Myself.

I Came Out Of A Culture In Which My Uncle, My Father - They Were All Salesmen Of One Kind Or Another. My Father Was A Manufacturer. He Also, In Effect, Had To Sell That Stuff. And If He Didn't Literally Do It, His Men Did. So, Selling Was In The Air Through My Boyhood. The Whole Idea Of Successfully Selling Was Very Important.

It Is Rare For People To Be Asked The Question Which Puts Them Squarely In Front Of Themselves

How To Live Had Started Out As An Analytical Problem Of How To Place Himself So As To Intercept The Flow Of Money In The Society.

The Very Impulse To Write Springs From An Inner Chaos Crying For Order - For Meaning.

Now Hell And Heaven Grapple On Our Backs And All Our Old Pretense Is Ripped Away. Aye, And God's Icy Wind Will Blow.

Above All Else, Tragedy Requires The Finest Appreciation By The Writer Of Cause And Effect.

Success, Instead Of Giving Freedom Of Choice, Becomes A Way Of Life. There's No Country I've Been To Where People, When You Come Into A Room And Sit Down With Them, So Often Ask You, "what Do You Do?" And, Being American, Many's The Time I've Almost Asked That Question, Then Realized It's Good For My Soul Not To Know. For A While! Just To Let The Evening Wear On And See What I Think Of This Person Without Knowing What He Does And How Successful He Is, Or What A Failure. We're Ranking Everybody Every Minute Of The Day.

I Know That My Works Are A Credit To This Nation And I Dare Say They Will Endure Longer Than The Mccarran Act.

The Witch-hunt Was A Perverse Manifestation Of The Panic Which Set In Among All Classes When The Balance Began To Turn Toward Greater Individual Freedom. The Witch-hunt Was Not, However, A Mere Repression. It Was Also, And As Importantly, A Long Overdue Opportunity For Everyone So Inclined To Express Publicly His Guilt And Sins, Under The Cover Of Accusations Against The Victims.

Certainly The Most Diverse, If Minor, Pastime Of Literary Life Is The Game Of Find The Author.

Where Choice Begins, Paradise Ends, Innocence Ends, For What Is Paradise But The Absence Of Any Need To Choose This Action?

Look, We're All The Same; A Man Is A Fourteen-room House - In The Bedroom He's Asleep With His Intelligent Wife, In The Living-room He's Rolling Around With Some Bare Ass Girl, In The Library He's Paying His Taxes, In The Yard He's Raising Tomatoes And In The Cellar He's Making A Bomb To Blow It All Up.

I'm A Fatalist.... I Consider I Am Rejected In Principle. My Work Is And, Through My Work, I Am. If It's Accepted, It's Miraculous Or The Result Of A Misunderstanding.

Everything We Are Is At Every Moment Alive In Us.

In A Dream, We Are Simply Confronted With Various Loaded Symbols, And Where One Is Exhausted, It Gives Way To Another.

A Play's An Interpretation. It Is Not A Report. And That Is The Beginning Of Its Poetry Because, In Order To Interpret, You Have To Distort Toward A Symbolic Construction Of What Happened, And As That Distortion Takes Place, You Begin To Leave Out And Overemphasize And Consequently Deliver Up Life As A Unity Rather Than As A Chaos, And Any Such Attempt, The More Intense It Is, The More Poetic It Becomes.

A Small Man Can Be Just As Exhausted As A Great Man.

The Writer Must Be In It; He Can't Be To One Side Of It, Ever. He Has To Be Endangered By It. His Own Attitudes Have To Be Tested In It. The Best Work That Anybody Ever Writes Is The Work That Is On The Verge Of Embarrassing Himself, Always.

A Lot Of My Work Goes To The Center Of Where We Belong--if There Is Any Root To Life -because Nowadays The Family Is Broken Up, And People Don't Live In The Same Place For Very Long.

A Friend Of Mine Once Said That There Were Only Two Truly National Events In The History Of The United States. One Was The Civil War And The Other One Was The Depression.

There Is A Problem On The So-called Commercial Stage In New York. The Price Of A Ticket Is Exorbitant, And There Are No Longer Original Productions Possible, Apparently, On The Commercial Stage. They Are All Plays That Were Taken From Either England Or Smaller Theaters, Off-broadway Theaters, And So On. The One Justification There Used To Be For The Commercial Theater Was That It Originated Everything We Had, And Now It Originates Nothing. But The Powers That Be Seem Perfectly Content To Have It That Way. They Don't Risk Anything Anymore, And They Simply Pick Off The Cream.

A Playwright... Is... The Litmus Paper Of The Arts. He's Got To Be, Because If He Isn't Working On The Same Wave Length As The Audience, No One Would Know What In Hell He Was Talking About.

Great Stones They Lay Upon His Chest Until He Plead Aye Or Nay. They Say He Give Them But Two Words. "more Weight," He Says. And Died.

. . Usually, The Biggest Problems Of Adapting Plays Into Screenplays Is That They Stick Too Close To The Play, And I Think Film Is A Completely Different Medium. I Think A Novel Is Much Closer To A Film.

The Camera Has Its Own Kind Of Consciousness; In The Lens The Garden Of Eden Itself Would Become Ever So Slightly Too Perfect.

The Greeks Used To Use The Same Stories, The Same Mythology, Time After Time, Different Authors. There Was No Premium Placed Upon An Original Story, And Indeed, Shakespeare Likewise. A Lot Of People Wrote Plays About Great Kings. They Didn't Expect A Brand-new Story. It Was What That New Author Made Of The Old Story. It Is Probably The Same Now. We Disguise It By Inventing What Seem To Be New Stories, But They're Basically The Same Story Anyway.

I Have Made More Friends For American Culture Than The State Department. Certainly I Have Made Fewer Enemies, But That Isn't Very Difficult.

Every Time I Am Reading Actors I Can Pretty Well Tell Which Ones Have Studied With Meisner. It Is Because They Are Honest And Simple And Don't Lay On Complications That Aren't Necessary.

When Irrational Terror Takes To Itself The Fiat Of Moral Goodness Somebody Has To Die. ... No Man Lives Who Has Not Got A Panic Button, And When It Is Pressed By The Clean White Hand Of Moral Duty, A Certain Murderous Train Is Set In Motion.

Work A Lifetime To Pay Off A House You Finally Own It And There's Nobody To Live In It.

They Tried To Escape Technology, To Stay Away From That And Still Have Relationships With Their Fellow Humans. Very Difficult.

That Is A Very Good Question. I Don't Know The Answer. But Can You Tell Me The Name Of A Classical Greek Shoemaker?

If I See An Ending, I Can Work Backward.

Theater Is A Very Changeable Art. It Responds To The Moment In History The Way The Newspaper Does, And There's No Predicting What To Come Up With Next.

When Today Fails To Offer The Justification For Hope, Tomorrow Becomes The Only Grail Worth Pursuing.

In The Theater, While You Recognized That You Were Looking At A House, It Was A House In Quotation Marks. On Screen, The Quotation Marks Tend To Be Blotted Out By The Camera.

Quotation Marks

The Job Is To Ask Questions - It Always Was - And To Ask Them As Inexorably As I Can. And To Face The Absence Of Precise Answers With A Certain Humility.

Questions And Answers

Data Is A Lot Like Humans: It Is Born. Matures. Gets Married To Other Data, Divorced. Gets Old. One Thing That It Doesn't Do Is Die. It Has To Be Killed.

My Conception Of The Audience Is Of A Public Each Member Of Which Is Carrying About With Him What He Thinks Is An Anxiety, Or A Hope, Or A Preoccupation Which Is His Alone And Isolates Him From Mankind And In This Respect At Least The Function Of A Play Is To Reveal Him To Himself So That He May Touch Others By Virtue Of The Revelation Of His Mutuality With Them. If Only For This Reason I Regard The Theater As A Serious Business, One That Makes Or Should Make Man More Human, Which Is To Say, Less Alone.

Just Remember, Kid, You Can Quicker Get Back A Million Dollars That Was Stole Than A Word That You Gave Away.

When A Deposit Bottle Is Broken, You Don't Get Your Nickel Back.

If You Complain Of People Being Shot Down In The Streets, Of The Absence Of Communication Or Social Responsibility, Of The Rise Of Everyday Violence Which People Have Become Accustomed To, And The Dehumanization Of Feelings, Then The Ultimate Development On An Organized Social Level Is The Concentration Camp... The Concentration Camp Is The Final Expression Of Human Separateness And Its Ultimate Consequence. It Is Organized Abandonment.

The Two Greatest Plays Ever Written Were Hamlet And Oedipus Rex, And They're Both About Father-son Relationships.

I Think It's A Mistake To Ever Look For Hope Outside Of One's Self.

I Am Bewildered By The Death Of Love. And My Responsibility For It.

Because It Is My Name! Because I Cannot Have Another In My Life! Because I Lie And Sign Myself To Lies! Because I Am Not Worth The Dust On The Feet Of Them That Hang! How May I Live Without My Name? I Have Given You My Soul; Leave Me My Name!

I Think The Tragic Feeling Is Invoked In Us When We Are In The Presence Of A Character Who Is Ready To Lay Down His Life, If Need Be, To Secure One Thing -- His Sense Of Personal Dignity.

The Best Work That Anybody Ever Writes Is The Work That Is On The Verge Of Embarrassing Him, Always.

By Whatever Means It Is Accomplished, The Prime Business Of A Play Is To Arouse The Passions Of Its Audience So That By The Route Of Passion May Be Opened Up New Relationships Between A Man And Men, And Between Men And Man. Drama Is Akin To The Other Inventions Of Man In That It Ought To Help Us To Know More, And Not Merely To Spend Our Feelings.

Self-realization And Self-fulfilment Are The Sine Qua Non For Human Existence.

I Know You're No Worse Than Most Men But I Thought You Were Better. I Never Saw You As A Man. I Saw You As My Father.

Rise Early. Write. Disappoint Your Sons. Read The Newspaper. Go To Bed Early. Success.

The Crucible Became By Far My Most Frequently Produced Play, Both Abroad And At Home. Its Meaning Is Somewhat Different In Different Places And Moments. I Can Almost Tell What The Political Situation In A Country Is When The Play Is Suddenly A Hit There It Is Either A Warning Of Tyranny On The Way Or A Reminder Of Tyranny Just Past.

I Don't Know A Critic Who Penetrates The Center Of Anything.

Willie Was A Salesman. And For A Salesman, There Is No Rock Bottom To Life?. He's A Man Way Out There In The Blue, Riding On A Smile And A Shoeshine. And When They Start Not Smiling Back - That's An Earthquake.

People Do Look To Others For Some Leadership, And It's Not Bad For Them To Supply It When They Feel That Way.

The Car, The Furniture, The Wife, The Children - Everything Has To Be Disposable. Because You See The Main Thing Today Is - Shopping.

The Apple Cannot Be Stuck Back On The Tree Of Knowledge; Once We Begin To See, We Are Doomed And Challenged To Seek The Strength To See More, Not Less.

Few Occasions Are As Joyous To Small Children As Funerals, Almost Better Than The Big Wedding Blowouts That Take Place At Night When It's Hard To Stay Awake. A Small Boy Will Never Be Harshly Criticized At A Funeral; He Is More Treasured As Death Comes Close And All His Wickedness Vanishes Before The Inescapable Fact That Thank God, He Is Healthy.

Poor Brain! How Helplessly It Dissolves When Willing Eyes Meet And The Nose Warms To Those Old Jungle Scents.

Down Deep In His Heart God Is A Comedian Who Loves To Make Us Laugh.

Pathos Truly Is The Mode For The Pessimist. But Tragedy Requires A Nicer Balance Between What Is Possible And What Is Impossible. And It Is Curious, Although Edifying, That The Plays We Revere, Century After Century, Are The Tragedies. In Them, And In Them Alone, Lies The Belief-optimistic, If You Will, In The Perfectibility Of Man.

In America, Any Man Who Is Not A Reactionary In His Views Is Open To The Charge Of Alliance With The Red Hell.

A Man Is Not A Bird, To Come And Go With The Springtime.

The Famous Are Balloons Far Up In The Sky, To Be Envied For Their Quiet Freedom Or Shot Down As Enemies.

Suicide Kills Two People.

The Parochial Snobbery Of These People Was Partly Responsible For Their Failure To Convert The Indians. Probably They Also Preferred To Take Land From Heathens Rather Than From Fellow Christians. At Any Rate, Very Few Indians Were Converted, And The Salem Folk Believed That The Virgin Forest Was The Devil's Last Preserve, His Home Base And The Citadel Of His Final Stand. To The Best Of Their Knowledge The American Forest Was The Last Place On Earth That Was Not Paying Homage To God.

Willy Loman: I Don't Want Change, I Want Swiss Cheese!

There Might Be A Dragon With Five Legs In My House, But No One Has Ever Seen It.

Pop, I'm Nothing! I'm Nothing, Pop. Can't You Understand That? There's No Spite In It Any More. I'm Just What I Am, That's All.

The Devil Is Precise; The Marks Of His Presence Are Definite As Stone.

The Jungle Is Dark But Full Of Diamonds, Willy.

Betrayal Is The Only Truth That Sticks.

Cleave To No Faith When Faith Brings Blood.

Great Drama Is Great Questions Or It Is Nothing But Technique. I Could Not Imagine A Theater Worth My Time That Did Not Want To Change The World.

I've Always Made A Point Of Not Wasting My Life, And Every Time I Come Back Here I Know That All I've Done Is To Waste My Life.

When The Guns Roar, The Arts Die.

And Old Dave, He'd Go Up To His Room, Y'understand, Put On His Green Velvet Slippers - I'll Never Forget - And Pick Up His Phone And Call The Buyers, And Without Leaving His Room, At The Age Of Eighty-four, He Made His Living. And When I Saw That, I Realized That Selling Was The Greatest Career A Man Could Want.

Proctor, His Mind Wild, Breathless: I Say--i Say--god Is Dead!

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